Category Archives: Music

When the Beatles were new John Lennon made fun of the cripples seated down front of whatever theater—he’d do a retard act. I’ve never forgotten this nor can I find it in myself to forgive him. I was a disabled kid and now I’m a disabled man. I have to enact patience and forgiveness daily. Ableist behavior is legion. I make it through by means of small dispensations, little pardons, absolving the bus driver who resents me, willing beneficence, handing out invisible coins of absolution to the cab driver who refuses me a ride. Lovingkindness is the Christian word for this. I try to love my oppressors.

Ableism, taken nominally, is insufficient to highlight real circumstances. Those who think themselves superior to a woman in a wheelchair or a man who walks with a stick are exceptionalists and if they’re not educable they become tacit eugenicists for social Darwinism lurks behind most disability discrimination. The fascist wants to make the world clean, wishes for a sanitized sameness in the population, argues passionately against expenditures for the care and rehabilitation of those who require assistance. Meantime the disabled muster some forbearance and get on with it. The taxi that refused you will likely be followed by one that accepts you. Yet the message is clear: disabled, you’re a problem on the street, in the airport, in the classroom, the supermarket, the hotel, health club, doctor’s office, college campus, the theater, symphony hall, and all workplaces.

“Problem” is not the right word of course—problems are solvable or at least they’re invitations to find a solution, or what I like to call “solvation” much as Jamaican people say “no problem mon!” True ableism requires an antipathy to finding disability solutions and it depends on a willful lack of irony individually and collectively. The singular ableist is someone like the junior high school principal who says “no” when a 12 year old girl with cerebral palsy wants to bring her authentic service dog to school. Collective ableism is the school board behind the principal. They say: “of course we cannot have a service dog in the classroom! Think of the children who will somehow be ruined by this!”

In order to think this you must be an inherent exceptionalist who despises intellectual and bodily difference. Such people believe not in solvation but in segregation, deportation, and even annihilation.

Lovingkindness is the hardest thing in my life. I know I’m working daily with college faculty and administrators who resent the disabled. I try thinking of how damaged they are—that they’ve been made to accept compulsory normalcy by means of many cruelties. They were always racing to get one step ahead. For them disability represents the thing they fear most: the loss of distinction, both intellectually and performatively. At the big conference cocktail party where faculty are first anointed they must “present” as having just arrived from the gym.

I find I can’t forgive John Lennon. Later he wrote a song called “Crippled Inside” which is just as offensive as his youthful face pulling. And I can’t forgive the social Darwinists around me. I’m a little worn out from all the forgiving I have to do in the customary street to forgive those whose educations and talents should prevent them from outrageous bigotry.

If words have import they must be like rain. Be careful how you speak. A torrent and invested meanings are washed away. A pittance and if you’re lucky perhaps you’ve written a poem, though this is not likely or assured.

In the dictionary of rain are clues to sailing and growing wheat and yes, how to raise children and support the aged.

I’ve not read the entire book of rain speech though I’m pursuing it.

I understand as I open my throat I’ve a chance to turn this place into a cafe chantants with many dancers.

I do not know who you are.

Every opportunity for speech is a moral concourse with the body and landscape.

The first day the great tenor Enrico Caruso really sang—that is, lifting his face to the middle distance and calling up a rare angel—that first day, he felt larger than anyone, any man, like a colossus, but with this trick, he was a giant you could see through for such is a voice, an invitation to incorporeality.

This happened in Cairo in the Ezbekieh Gardens. The whole district had singers on every corner. Dancers. Puppeteers. Baccarat players. Men who put small coins on their tongues to kiss passing strangers.

He sang for the champagne supper crowd at the El Dorado, for the winners of trente et quarante…

And the voice was there, lifting his heavy torso. You could still see stars in Cairo in those days.

Through my volunteer work at [with]tv I’ve had the pleasure and the privilege of *meeting*
(in
cyberspace) and corresponding with Laurie Rubin.

Laurie is an accomplished Mezzo Soprano. Listen to this CBS interview I just discovered and you will learn more about this "world class opera singer" who has "performed in the White House and in some of the worlds finest Halls…"

(Photo description: Laurie is on stage performing in her New York recital debut with pianist David Wilkinson. Wearing a teal evening gown, she looks quite beautiful. She’s standing in front of a grand piano; David is wearing a black suit. We can see the backs of the heads of her audience in Weill Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, March 2004.)

Laurie has released a CD of art songs by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Beethoven, Brahms, Hahn, Bizet, Copland, Rorem, Harbison and some beloved Yiddish pieces with pianists Graham Johnson and David Wilkinson on the Opera Omnia label.

"Faith in Spring" can be purchased via this link on Laurie’s web site.

A music critic I am not but I know what I enjoy, and Steve and I enjoy listening to this often…

Laurie, we look forward to the day when we can actually experience your musical gift in a live performance. We’ll be keeping our eyes on you!

Once when I was around 14 and full of zeal of a certain kind, I went to hear Frank Zappa and his rock band "The Mothers of Invention". Zappa was a brainiac cross fertilized rock and roller with a strong interest in 20th century classical music and a more than passing understanding of jazz. Unlike most rockers of the 60’s and 70’s Zappa looked down on the use of drugs and he used to whip out a flashlight and train it on the audience, casting about until he saw someone who looked especially stoned. He would really make fun of that poor, witless guy. The man hated playing to a stoned theater. He wrote inventive and outlandish songs about drug users. He would sing: "who you jiving’ with that cosmic debris?"

Frank Zappa could also play a peppery, lickety-split lead guitar and while other kids my age talked endlessly of the guitar mastery of Eric Clapton or Jimi Hendrix, I was convinced that FZ had the real chops. I can still hear Zappa’s transcendent guitar solo from the song "Zombie Woof" on his album "Over-Nite Sensation"—I can hear it in memory, note for note, the way Hemingway said he could follow a trout stream in his imagination.

Frank Zappa died all too early from prostate cancer and I find that on this particular autumn day I miss his brand of social satire and his exceptional musicianship. All I want to do is go down to my local record store and buy the latest from "the Mothers".

Here’s to intelligent and impatient rock and roll. Here’s to a deep distrust of lazy audiences. Here’s to living the art while disdaining the commercial music industry.

Here’s to a hot suspicion of authority but without all the contemporary cheap perfume of despair.

Before continuing with this post (written by Steve) as a contribution to the next Disability Blog Carnival, Steve and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Penny L. Richards for her all her continuing hard work and dedication to the Disability Blog Carnival, which she launched one year ago. Bravo, Penny. Bravo! We’ve made many new friends thanks to you!

In the summer of 1978 I went to a restaurant and bar called The Sanctuary in Iowa City to hear the folk singer Bob Gibson who was billed as "the living legend". I knew nothing about Gibson except that there was a small photo of him in the newspaper and he was shown with a 12 string guitar.

I was 23 years old and fresh out of college and I’d come to Iowa to study poetry writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I was immoderately in love with the collected Folkways recordings of Leadbelly and I owned a third rate 12 string guitar that wouldn’t stay tuned and I spent far too much of my time trying to play "The Bourgeois Blues" and "The Midnight Special" without having any concept that Leadbelly used a different tuning.

I was lonely that summer. I’d rented a student apartment that came without furniture. The landlord loaned me a sofa with no legs and a bed. I sat in the empty living room and tuned my bad guitar and wondered how I would make it in the world with my evolving blindness and my obvious incapacity to do the customary jobs reserved for America’s misfits. Blind people don’t drive taxis or wait tables or serve as short order cooks. Anyway, I was too much in love with poetry to picture myself doing much of anything. I didn’t feel sorry for myself: I kept as much as possible inside poems and songs. I sang Elizabeth Cotton’s "Freight Train" in my barren apartment as the prairie dusk came with its graduated softness.

The Sanctuary was a skinny room with a bar on one wall and a small stage on the other side. The tables in the center had real church pews for seats. Although my vision was unreliable I estimated there were about 70 customers sitting in those pews and perhaps a dozen people at the bar. A good turn out in a small town.

I asked the waitress if I could have a table by the stage since I was "legally blind" and she said this would be okay. I ordered a Pabst Blue Ribbon and waited for the show.

I suppose I should remember who warmed up for Gibson but I don’t. I’m sure it was someone with plenty of talent. Iowa City has a good folk music scene. What I do remember is that when Bob Gibson came out The Sanctuary was suddenly packed and the warmth of the crowd was spontaneous and communal. These were Gibson groupies and I could sense that lots of them had driven from outlying Iowa farm towns to be there.

I didn’t know that Bob Gibson had been the headline performer at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival and that he was the person who introduced Joan Baez to the music world when he invited her on stage to sing with him. I didn’t know that Bob Gibson had co-written songs with Phil Ochs or that he had sung with Pete Seeger or that he had been a noted performer in the glory days of New York City’s folk scene in "the village". I had no idea that he was a pal of Shel Silverstein’s and that they had begun writing songs together.

But man, I knew instant warmth when I felt it.

Gibson arranged the shoulder strap of his Martin 12 string while the applause rolled over the room.

Then he sang Phil Och’s anthem "There But For Fortune" and I was utterly floored.

I’ve had the good fortune to hear some amazing musical performances over the years, from The Beatles to La Scala, from Domingo to Duke Ellington, but I’ve never heard anything quite as wonderful as Bob Gibson’s beautiful 12 string and sweet light baritone in that little room in Iowa City.

Bob Gibson died too young and toward the end of his life he suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

I can’t tell you why I’m thinking of him today. I feel a sweet ache and a taste perhaps of water taken from a tin cup and I want to pass it along. If you don’t know Bob Gibson’s amazing music I urge you to get your hands on his cd’s at Amazon. Or better yet, go to a vintage record store in Chicago and talk to someone who may once have heard him play at the Gates of Horn.